3 comments to Devil In The Details

There was a report from the FBI about there not having ever been a genuine satanic cult crime, but I can’t remember the report title or author and google search only returns a few thousand hits of nonsense from places like prisonplanet and whale.to. But, in the end it really only matters If his delusions were strong enough to override his knowledge that carrying out his plans was wrong. The advance planning, killing witnesses, attempting to cover up by destroying evidence and attempting to flee the scene all act contrary to that. Further, the time to present a mental disease or defect as a defense was in the trial itself, not in the penalty phase.

Second, although I too fail to see the relevance here for mitigation, this isn’t unexpected, coming from the Komisarjevsky defense team. Since the conviction and death-sentence of co-defendant Hayes, they’ve ramped up their support for their client in any and every way possible. Theirs is clearly a “shotgun” approach … they’re firing everything they’ve got, regardless of value or relevance, in their effort to paint their client as a wayward saint rather than a vicious sociopath. Their tactics have even included a personal vendetta — in the courtroom as well as in the media — against the massacre’s sole survivor, Dr Petit. (Recently, this particular aspect of their strategy has paid off; even the judge has started reprimanding Dr Petit when prompted to do so by Komisarjevsky’s attorneys.)

So it almost goes without saying that irrelevancy is going to be thrown up in the course of the death-penalty hearing. Expect more, not less, of it as it goes on. I get why they’re doing it — their client is basically doomed and they know it, so their actions are borne of furious desperation. What I failed to understand is how several weeks of this is supposed to ingratiate their client to the jury. Surely the jurors aren’t naive or stupid enough to be swindled into seeing this as relevant; at least some, if not all, of them must be asking themselves, “Why are these lawyers wasting our time on this Satanism crap?” They can’t be pleased with it.